


Not the Typical Protoype

by samescenes



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, Gen, Mostly Gen, Pre-Femslash, Team Bonding, gaby finds a lot of excuses to be accidentally close to illya
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-14 19:56:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14143383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samescenes/pseuds/samescenes
Summary: Gaby watches the team come together. And also, Illya is a girl!!! This is, disappointingly, hardly relevant to the story.





	Not the Typical Protoype

**Author's Note:**

> As my mother always said, write the change you want to see in the world.

Gaby didn’t know what she thought would happen - that she’d be free to go on about her life, now she was out from behind the wall. Somehow, she thought Waverly would just let her walk away. She was no spy, she was a recruitment of opportunity. Her father was dead, her uncle was dead, all the bombs were blown up, and she had no more connections to Nazi sympathizers. 

“You’ve got a codename,” Waverly says, blowing all that to hell. “A rather good one.”

She looks at Napoleon first: his body is one leonine curve against the terrace balcony, his drink tilted loosely in one hand. But his eyebrows are raised - he is surprised, then, but not angry. His eyes are cut toward Illya, and Gaby follows his gaze.

Illya, not surprisingly, is stone. There is a - a sort of tension, Gaby supposes, but that is par for the course. Her eyebrows are drawn, mouth a straight line, and she looks out over the Roman rooftops. Gaby looks back to Napoleon, who is now looking at her.

He shrugs, and takes a drink.

Well, she supposes. That’s that, then.

\----

Napoleon takes to teamwork like he takes to all things: with a great deal of noise and flash, and un utter inability to compromise. Illya, she’s not sure about - she’s never sure about. Illya never complains, not like Napoleon does, loudly and carelessly and to anyone who will listen. Illya, with her gargoyle face and gargoyle shoulders and her warm, caring hands. Gaby remembers Illya hovering over her shoulder after she was pulled from the wreckage of Alexander Vinciguerra’s car, wiping the stubborn mix of dirt, blood and rain from her eyes with the sleeve of her turtleneck.

Illya, with the scar over her left eye.

Illya, who chased Gaby down like a machine in East Berlin.

Watching Illya work from the other side of the fence, though, is a thing of beauty. In Istanbul, Illya runs the mark down on foot, jumping from roof to roof, while Gaby tries her best to wind her way through the market on a scooter. It’s Napoleon who gets the mark in the end, though, barrelling out of an alley at exactly the right second, pulling the parking brake of the open-top Jeep and dovetailing into a very stylish slide so the rear of the car sweeps into the mark’s own scooter. Gaby arrives into the market square just in time to see the mark’s body arc into the air and knock down a row of bicycles. Illya drops down from somewhere with nary a sound, draws her gun, and stands over the mark, who’s not out cold, but seems unlikely to get up any time soon.

“So glad you could join us,” Napoleon says, with his smug jackal grin.

Illya is barely breathing hard - she bares her teeth at Solo in an open-mouth smile. Gaby had kept track of her out of the corner of her eye, jumping rooftops, rolling through hard landings. It seems unfair Napoleon was the one, in the end, to run the mark down, but that’s Solo to a tee - work smart, not hard, and look good doing it. 

Gaby gets the feeling Illya has never picked the easy way of doing anything.

“Illya, darling -” Napoleon starts, and suddenly Illya has two guns, one still steady on the mark, and the other trained on Napoleon’s center mass. 

Napoleon puts his hands up. “Quite right, comrade,” he says. “Message received. Pet names, not advised.”

Gaby laughs, despite herself. She gets the feeling Napoleon has never found a boundary he hasn’t pushed.

“Let’s go. We have to call it in,” Illya says, putting the second gun back somewhere on her person. She glances at Gaby, and maybe - just maybe - that’s a flash of humor in her eye.

Illya and Napoleon get the mark standing, and frog march him over to Napoleon’s Jeep. Gaby wonders which poor sucker is starting to miss it. 

Gaby’s mood seems to be infectious: she’s in the passenger seat and Napoleon and Illya bicker through the rearview mirror, Napoleon driving, and Illya in the backseat with the seemingly concussed weapons dealer. Apparently, the market has a circular Russian design, and if Napoleon had followed her lead, she knew exactly where the mark was running to, and she would have apprehended him out of the public eye.

Napoleon makes agreeing noises in the middle, injecting a little “Russian architect, of course,” when Illya draws breath. Illya must know she’s being made fun of, but she continues with a straight face.

“And so, I had plan the whole time, and there was no need to show up in your flashy American car,” Illya finishes. 

“I never doubted you for a second, Agent Kuryakin,” Napoleon says.

Gaby can picture it in her mind’s eye: Illya looking straight ahead, eyebrows drawn, and almost, but not quite, smiling. She spends the rest of the ride staring out the window, trying not to look at either Illya or Napoleon, lest she start laughing.

Their safe house is a broken-down apartment building in one of the outer suburbs of Istanbul. No one lives there, or if they did, they were squatters shooed out by UNCLE. When she gets him on the satellite phone, Waverly congratulates her, and the team by extension, on a job well done. He gives her an extraction point: they are to clear the city as fast as possible, stealth being the order of the day. This will be Illya’s gig, then, probably much to Napoleon’s consternation. 

And sure enough, when she tells them, Napoleon groans, and Illya crosses her arms in satisfaction, but he passes her the car keys nonetheless. Illya promptly passes them to Gaby. 

“You are on transport detail,” she says. “Do you know the way?”

Gaby puts her hand on her heart, like it hurts. “You ask me this,” she says, “to my face?”

Illya grunts. She stomps past Gaby, back to the Jeep, where the mark is starting to come round. Before he can get any ideas, Illya pulls him unceremoniously from the vehicle, and he flops onto the ground, groaning. She turns him onto his front, puts her knee in the center of his back, and hogties him neatly and efficiently. 

“Do you hear me?” she says, brisk.

“Yeah, I fucking hear you,” he says.

“You’re going to go in the trunk,” she says, and pauses for his ensuing complaint. “That is non-negotiable. Is quick ride, don’t worry. If you are good, when you get onto plane, you can sit in seat, have food, maybe nap. Your hands will stay bound. If you annoy me in even slightest way, I will stuff you in my luggage for entire eighteen hour flight, and you go to prison via the baggage claim. Understand?”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” the guys says, muffled through the dirt in his mouth.

“Good,” Illya says. “Gaby, help?” So Gaby grabs him at the knees, and Illya grabs him underneath his shoulders, and they haul him into the trunk of their getaway vehicle.

He doesn’t struggle much, so Gaby feels extra bad when her fingers lose their grip at the last second, and his dismount into the car ends in a thump.

“Sorry, sorry!” she says, over his indignant groans. She’s fallen half over him, and Illya’s shadow looms over her, Illya having stumbled forward in order to save the mark from hitting his head on the jamb between the interior of the trunk and the body of the car. “Sorry,” she says again, this time to the indistinct shape of the woman behind her. Gaby turns, but Illya is so close Gaby’s eyes don’t really focus on any detail but the weave of her black turtleneck. 

Illya shuts the trunk over the sound of the mark railing against them in Turkish.

“Is okay,” Illya says, soft enough that the words would never travel further than Gaby’s ears. They’ve stood this close together only a few times before - once, when Gaby was drunk, and once, when Illya was checking her tracking device. Gaby notices now what she noticed then - Illya’s eyelashes are long, her nose aristocratic, and her shoulders are always squared for a fight.

“Ladies,” Napoleon says, from the other side of the car. He has everyone’s bags in hand, and is standing in front of the open passenger door. He looks between them, head cocked. 

Illya exhales. She touches Gaby on the elbow, and moves to where Solo is standing.

“Move, Cowboy,” she says. “You have backseat.”

\----

The missions aren’t all that easy, of course. In Kiev, Boston and Lucerne, Illya gets shot, and Napoleon breaks a leg jumping from a third floor window in Glasglow. Gaby, for her part, is in at least three more car crashes, and during a mission to stop a slavery ring smuggling people across the Berlin Wall, she is detained for a terrifying two and a half hours at Checkpoint Charlie.

By the time Napoleon comes to get her, she is tight-lipped and trembling. The guards had made her tea, but it sat by her elbow undrunk, lest she tip it all over herself.

Napoleon, in his American sunglasses with his American briefcase and lazy, American vowels, gets her out by flashing multiple pieces of paper. She watches through two panes of thick, soundproof glass as guards scurry around him. Even though he’s got those absurd glasses on, she knows he’s looking at her. She doesn’t look away.

When they finally unlock the door, Gaby exits the room and turns to examine herself in the thick glass. Her hair is a mess, and she tucks a few of the strays back into her elastic. 

“Where’s Illya,” she murmurs through a mouth full of hair pins.

“Waiting in the car,” Napoleon says, lounging beside her reflection, like he’s got nowhere else he’d rather be. The guard behind her taps his foot.

“Good,” she says.

The sunlight, when they finally get outside, hurts her eyes. She shields them, scanning the road in front of the checkpoint offices, but Napoleon guides her to an alley two streets down. Illya’s exfil must not have gone to plan, either.

Illya says nothing when Gaby gets in the car, but she can feel her looking. She gets in the backseat and stretches out as much as she can, face down.

“I’m going to sleep,” she says. “Get me out of here.”

\----

So they get closer, little by little. Illya teaches Gaby chess; Gaby teaches Illya emergency vehicle first aid. Napoleon shows them both some confidence tricks, to which Gaby has taken great joy in watching Illya fail. It’s not that she’s bad, exactly, because she’s certainly earnest enough to fool a layperson, and there is something straightforward about her manner that Napoleon tells her to exploit, but it’s not exactly like they’re trying to fool laypeople in their line of work.

They steer clear of each other’s wounds, for the most part, but Napoleon, as always, gets bored without a button to push.

“You’re a woman in the KGB, Peril, surely they taught you some things,” he says, when Illya absolutely refuses to grasp the basics of a con involving a middle-aged businessman, a bellhop, a Fabergé egg, and the Viennese Waltz.

Illya’s face, given to stillness at the best of times, shutters completely. Her arms would drop, but they’re being held in the frame of Napoleon’s as they shuffle around their apartment’s tiny living room. “You know nothing of KGB training,” she says, stiffly. “Let alone the training for females.”

There’s a pregnant silence throughout the room. Napoleon refuses to let go of her hand, held out on front of them in a tight grip, and Illya looks about two seconds away from decking him.

“Why don’t you dance with me,” Gaby says, with a hand out. “You can lead.”

Napoleon steps clear with a grace that would make any Bolshoi jealous. Gaby does not doubt he knows how close he came to a broken jaw.

Gaby is almost hilariously shorter than Illya, so when Illya places her hand on Gaby’s back, Gaby has to tilt her frame upwards, to the point of discomfort. 

“Just like old times,” Illya says, with a quirk of her mouth.

Napoleon makes an outraged sound, out of Gaby’s line of sight.

“ _When your baby -_ ,” Gaby hums under her breath, taking the first step backward. Illya, _God_ , Illya smiles, looking down at their shoes. She takes a mirroring step forward.

“Look at me, please - _leaves you all alone -_ ”

Illya looks up. Her mouth has settled back into it’s usual flat line, but her eyes are warm, and there’s a flush of color to her cheeks. Gaby takes another two steps backward, which Illya follows, but when she steps to the side, Illya stumbles. 

“ _And nobody calls you on the phone -_ ” Illya recovers admirably, with only a quick tensing of her jaw. When Gabby repeats her steps, Illya copies flawlessly.

“ _Doncha feel like crying -_ ” She turns them in a slow circle, with small shuffling steps. 

“ _Doncha feel like crying -_ ” Gaby starts from the beginning again, but quicker. 

“ _Well here I am honey, come on -_ ” After they circle, Gaby breaks, and twirls herself under Illya’s arm. They come back together roughly, and Gaby bumps against Illya’s torso. 

“Cry to me,” Illya says - it’s certainly not singing, but it has a tonal quality to it that makes Gaby laugh delightedly.

“I’m being left out,” Napoleon says, but surprisingly without rancor.

“When you’re all alone,” Illya intones, starting the steps again. She leads this time, firm and sure under Gaby’s hands.

The evening passes like it had begun - that is to say, beautifully, and with a quiet air of companionship. Illya learns to do a quite adequate box step. Gaby learns many things, including the deep rasp of Napoleon’s voice when he sings. And, most beautifully, Gaby learns what Illya looks like when she throws her head back and laughs.

\----

She and Napoleon walk arm-in-arm along the Seine. The weather is mild, but it is still the first few days of winter, so Napoleon has on a woolen suit, while Gaby wears a Balenciaga coat with a collar so high it covers her chin. Napoleon raided the wardrobe of a dead fascist - whether her coat was for the fascist or his mistress, Gaby doesn’t know and doesn’t ask.

“It’s a gift and I don’t wish to be rude,” she had said when he gave it to her, Illya looking on with a particularly communist slant of her brows.

“You look like gangster from American film,” Illya said, when Napoleon shrugged on his checked Camps de Luca overcoat.

“Thank you,” Napoleon said, looming behind Gaby to check his reflection as she applied lipstick in the hall mirror. She watched him check the knot of his tie and smooth it down over his chest.

Illya sniffed, and walked out of the hallway, into the depths of their Parisian suite. “Those shoes are wrong,” she called over her shoulder.

“They’re _bespoke_ ,” Napoleon had said in horror, but she was already gone.

But that was well over an hour ago, and Illya is probably sitting comfortably at the kitchen table, playing chess against herself and drinking tea, while Gaby and Napoleon lay the groundwork for their cover as rich fascists, visiting Paris just as the local underground network of next-gen Mussolinis is looking to recruit more members after a few unfortunate accidents. 

They’re looking for a particular café in the sixteenth arrondissement with a good view of one of the suspect’s apartments. Napoleon gives her a little nudge when they see it, and they take a seat inside, next to the large floor-to-ceiling window that looks out onto the river.

Gaby lets him order their breakfast, and lets him make a teasing remark to the waiter about her addiction to pastry, even though she knows he’s going to eat every single one of them. Their seat has a good view of the apartment’s windows, and a partial view of the external gate, but they are going to need a better vantage point if they want a better idea of the comings and goings from the front door.

“So,” Napoleon says, after the waiter delivers their coffee.

“Hmmm,” Gaby says. The high fence around the building may be a problem; maybe Illya could infiltrate as a maid.

“You and Illya are becoming quite close,” Napoleon says.

“I suppose,” Gaby says, even though it’s true. Napoleon and her got off to a better start than her and Illya, with him helping her out of her cage in East Berlin, but Illya’s slow thawing has been a revelation to Gaby.

“She’s certainly something.”

That makes her eyes cut toward Napoleon, who is looking back at her with the face of a cherub, stirring his coffee.

“Don’t tell me you’re thinking about -”

“No!” Napoleon says, looking honestly surprised, and not a little hurt. “I just meant, I’m glad you have her.”

“We all have each other.”

Napoleon inclines his head at this, watching her. “I hope Illya thinks so too,” he says.

“I think she knows,” Gaby says, decisive. “I’ll make sure she knows.”

“You do that, Chop Shop.” Napoleon smiles at her, the easy one she used to think he only used on his marks.

The waiter brings their breakfast then, a few madeleines, fresh from the oven, and a _pain au chocolat_ , for Napoleon’s sweet tooth.

They talk business, then, for a while, but Gaby turns it over in her head. Her friendship with Napoleon is natural, effortless: with Illya, it is less so. Gaby thinks of Illya’s short, barking laugh, that seems to take Illya by surprise as much as anyone else. She thinks of her reading Russian novels aloud, by the fire, and then paraphrasing them into English for Gaby - and sometimes mistranslating them, so Gaby can correct her. She thinks of them sharing a blanket in the helicopter after the Vinciguerra affair, with her shaking from shock. She thinks of the shy smile Illya gave her yesterday after she found a German bakery and came home with a half dozen _buchteln_ in a paper bag.

She and Napoleon take most of the day going from building to building doing preliminary reconnaissance. When they get back to their suite, the weather has turned from mild to biting, and all the shops are starting to close their shutters.

Gaby enters first, hangs up her entirely delicious new coat, and goes looking for Illya, who is found lying on the floor, doing wind-down stretches in their entirely too opulent drawing room. She must have gone for a run, or done a workout - not that you could tell, because she doesn’t look flushed or out of breath in the slightest.

“Hey,” Gaby says, leaning against the door frame. 

“Hey yourself,” Illya says. She learned that from Napoleon, and it warms Gaby to hear her say it.

“I hear you like jazz,” Gaby says. Illya looks up at her, narrow-eyed. “Let’s go out tonight.”

When Illya nods slowly, Gaby moves to the center of the room, offering her hand. When Illya takes it, hers is too warm and slightly sweaty. Gaby pulls on Illya’s hand, but isn’t entirely prepared for Illya’s weight when Illya levers herself up, so she stumbles forward and grabs Illya’s hand in both of hers. They end up standing too close together, Gaby staring straight at the pulse beating quickly in Illya’s neck.

Illya clears her throat.

“Go and get ready,” Gaby says. “Napoleon knows a place.”

“Of course he does,” Illya says, and goes.

\----


End file.
